[sunshowers]

While all of what you're saying is true, I think it is worth noting that historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers. I agree that in the matchmaking era, remote attestation via kernel-level anticheat is the inevitable solution that you converge to after a few iterations.

And yes, servers would often kick out people who were too outside of the general skill level, even if they weren't cheating. As (say) a p80 player, playing against a p99 player feels roughly as bad as playing against a cheater. (But of course the p99 player is doing so honestly.)

[ethbr1]

> historically a large chunk of this problem was solved by communities hosting servers

Yes and no.

I lived through that era too, and there are serious scaling problems: at some point, trying to banhammer griefers with rotating IPs becomes a full time job, and then the public servers turn into a dumpster fire.

[consteval]

Solution: submit them for an account ban.

The games that have the most cheating either:

1. don't do account bans

2. don't limit account creation

You can trivially limit account creation by just charging money for the games.

[ethbr1]

Account bans + community servers don't work either, as the chain of custody for evidence is tainted.

I say consteval was caught cheating on the server I run, and that account should be banned.

Am I, my server's admin, lying?

[consteval]

Probably you need some kind of "court" system. Or maybe if enough dedicated servers say you're cheating, they just ban you.

Yes this is more effort but from the company's perspective they outsource most of the effort to free labor. It can probably be abused if enough admins from different servers band together though.

[sunshowers]

From a labor exploitation point of view it's really hard to argue that that model is better than kernel-level anticheat.

[consteval]

Exploitation is a strong word. A lot of admins like running servers, and some even make money via ads. This is the case in TF2.

[sunshowers]

I think free to play is where the market has ended up.

I get it, though, I kind of stopped playing competitive games after it became all about the F2P grind. Even cosmetics-only F2P hits a part of my brain that I try keeping in check. I just play single-player and cooperative games now.

[ethbr1]

When one enters the career and/or family stage of life, it doesn't make sense to compete against people who have the time commitments of neither. ;)

[sunshowers]

Yeah, having written that I was thinking about this as well. There's a lot of unpaid labor involved in that model. Maybe, between rootkits and that kind of exploitation of humans, rootkits are the less unjust option.

[ethbr1]

I'd be curious how many anti-cheat rootkit vendors that there are out there, though. It seems like the sort of industry that consolidation to 3-4 larger, more well-funded vendors would be beneficial in terms of security.

Versus everyone rolling their own or using smaller / cheaper solutions.

[jeff_carr]

Not at all correct! Nothing of what was said is true. The actual reality is:

* Microsoft makes piles of money from Gaming * Microsoft got involved with Gaming to damage Linux adoption and corporate support (Sony/Linux/Playstation) * Microsoft spends massive amounts of attention on gaming to lock in the general public to Windows * Microsoft continues to lose to Linux * Microsoft uses cheating to lie about open source being 'something something' cheaters

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has absolutely no interest in an open source solution to these problems and are using these issues to lie, mislead and spread FUD in some absurd fantasy world where only some superior microsoft driven closed source solution is the only possible way this can be solved. All of that is a complete lie. Nothing more.

A smart linux and free software lawyer would be wise to file a class action lawsuit for discovery documents inside Microsoft where one would undoubtedly find piles of emails between the executives hell bent on doing everything to damage Linux adoption have stupidly wielded this unidentified axe which is actually a -4 cursed boat anchor.

Anyone that tells you that computer security or trust can only be done with proprietary software is lying to you for their own benefit.

[sunshowers]

Sorry, where did Microsoft come in? I'm not sure what Microsoft thinks but I do see both the ups and the downs of remote attestation.